The question is not at all whether the Chinese or anybody else desire Christ, but whether they need Him, and a man's answer to that question largely depends upon his own relations to Christ. If we need Him, the Chinese do. If He has done anything for us, if He has brought any dignity and power and peace into our lives, the probabilities are that He can do as much for the Chinese. ``Be assured that the Christ who cannot save a Chinaman in longitude 117'0 East is a Christ who cannot save you in longitude 3'0 west. The question about missions would not be so lightly put, nor the answer so lightly listened to, if men realized that what is at stake is not a mere scheme of us missionaries, but the validity of their own hope of eternal life. Yet I am bound to say that the questions put to me, on returning from the mission field, by professedly Christian people often shake my faith, not in missions, but in their Christian profession. What kind of grasp of the gospel have men got, who doubt whether it is to-day, under any skies, the power of God unto salvation?''[106] [106] Gibson, pp. 11, 12. It passes comprehension that any one who has even a superficial knowledge of the real China can doubt for a moment its vital need of the gospel. The wretchedness of its life appalls an American who goes back into the unmodified conditions of the interior or even into the old Chinese city of proud Shanghai. As I journeyed through those vast throngs, climbed many hilltops and looked out upon the innumerable villages, which thickly dotted the plain as far as the eye could reach, as I saw the unrelieved pain and the crushing poverty and the abject fear of evil spirits, I felt that in China is seen in literal truth ``The Man with the Hoe.'' ``Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. ``What gulfs between him and the seraphim, Slave of the wheel of labour, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop.''